I love me some IPA, right up till you start adding adjectives… Hazy? Juicy? New England? West coast? No. Beer, hops, yum. Get the rest of that nonsense out of here. As a home brewer I refuse to get my Adjective IPA palate.
Sometimes I want something bitter. If I want hot and bitter, I’ll drink coffee. If I want cold and bitter, I’ll have an IPA. I also like dark chocolate. Must just be something about bitterness that I enjoy.
I really shouldn't be having beer at all anymore, but I actually came to like a number of fairly hoppy IPAs. I do have issues with certain bitter things, but not others; I love black coffee, but I can't stand high-cacao dark chocolate and some herbs with bitter notes.
I’ll give you an unpopular opinion in the opposite direction. I think most sweets and desserts are cloying as fuck and can’t understand why people eat them, or at least want more than a bite or two. I pretty much only have taste buds for savory/bitter/salty tastes these days, and hot sauce and peppers are awesome.
IPAs are an acquired taste, but the longer you drink craft beers the more likely you are to acquire it. As your palate becomes more refined, you start to appreciate different hop characteristics. Hop varieties have a wide range of flavors: floral, grassy, piney, citrusy, tropical, skunky, etc. If you’re making a “proper” beer, a nuanced hop schedule is the easiest way to create a complex flavor. IPAs have probably the highest flavor variety of any style, and most of them are pretty good once you can appreciate hops.
Except anything with Simcoe, that stuff tastes like cat piss.
I’ve tried to enjoy IPAs, really. I’m not discounting the role of interesting terpenes and flavonoids here, but the raw in-your-face excessive bitterness of IPA-level hops pushes all that great stuff so far from the stage of my experience, that it’s all left waiting in the lobby to get seated. For me, it’s like someone mixed LaCroix, light beer, and a drop of dish soap in a glass. Every time.
Try some West Coast IPAs. Pacific hops have less of that soapy bitterness with some pleasant tropical fruit notes. Galaxy is a particularly “juicy” variety, common in IPAs with “Space”, “Cosmic”, and other similar words in the name.
Both can be quite juicy, though you’re right. I should have focused on Pacific hops rather than West Coast styles, since they do feature resiny qualities in their fat hop schedules.
Rather than look at style, look for specific hops: Galaxy, Amarillo, Azaca, etc.
Fun fact: IPA stands for Indian Pale Ale. They were called that because they were shipped from England to India during the ole’ days (1800s). The purpose was to preserve the beer via it’s long journey to India. They would mellow out during the trip.
Eventually some idiots locally decided the massively hoppy beer tasted good, so it became popular in England as well, but sold as “Pale Ales”. I’ll argue it was never meant for human consumption.
There ARE craft beers that incorporate less hops and I hate that craft beer is now synonymous with hops or IPA. I hate heavy hops, but love hefeweizens, weiss, stouts, brown porters, Belgian dubble/tripels, lambics, wheats, bocks…
I used up all my taste acquisition credits coming around on coffee and tolerating alcohol at all. I have zero fucks left to give when it comes to training myself to like hops. The bitter little cancerous-asshole-looking motherfuckers may be necessary but I sure as hell don’t want the entire experience shaped by them.
I like these things but there are IPAs, peppers, and asses out there that I wouldn’t eat. I understand how it could be confusing though, when sometimes I say “this beer tastes like (bad) ass” or “this IPA is badass” or “eating this asshole is fire” or “this pepper is going to light my asshole on fire”.